Undercover Video: Illegal Monkey Trade Exposed; PETA Calls for Resignation of CITES Leader
For Immediate Release:
November 19, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Geneva, Switzerland — PETA today releases a never-before-seen undercover video showing long-tailed macaques reportedly illegally captured from the wild and confined in nylon mesh sacks in the trunk of a car. The monkeys are being delivered to an export facility that sells them to U.S. importers who, in turn, sell them to laboratories. This widespread practice, uncovered by U.S. authorities in 2022, has contributed to the decimation of the species, prompting the International Union for Conservation of Nature—the world’s foremost experts on species extinction—to reaffirm recently that long-tailed macaques are endangered. Last week, Thai authorities seized 83 macaques from smugglers who were transporting them to Cambodia.
Yet, Ivonn Higuero, Secretary-General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), recommended last week that the United Nations-administered treaty organization drop scrutiny of the monkey trade in Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines despite clear evidence of cruelty, monkey laundering, and corruption in Southeast Asia. The issue will be considered by the full CITES Standing Committee on November 23 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
Ahead of that meeting, PETA and Spain-based Abolición Vivisección are calling for Higuero’s resignation.
“CITES leaders are choosing to ignore overwhelming evidence that facilities in Southeast Asia are smuggling endangered monkeys—even as Thai authorities just last week seized trafficked macaques from smugglers’ vehicles headed to Cambodian self-described ‘breeding facilities’,” says PETA Senior Science Advisor on Primate Experimentation Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “CITES must restore credibility by replacing its Secretary-General and immediately suspending all macaque exports.”
Cruelty is on full display in PETA’s video. Insiders tell PETA that monkeys trapped from their natural homes who have been deemed too sick, too injured, or simply the wrong species have their necks snapped and their bodies are thrown onto a makeshift fire pit—destroying evidence of the illegal monkey laundering. Surviving monkeys are collared and folded into a breeding colony, their identities laundered inside barren concrete cages. High-risk pathogens are consistently found in monkey shipments, posing serious public health risks.
A multi-year investigation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service uncovered an estimated 30,000 wild-caught, long-tailed macaques from Cambodia were illegally exported to the United States using falsified CITES permits and laundered through Cambodian breeding farms. For years, Cambodia has failed to address glaring discrepancies in the number of long-tailed macaques reported in its breeding facilities with the number of animals exported. A PETA analysis of data reported by Cambodia to CITES found that growth rates at these facilities between 2017 and 2023 were biologically impossible.
Shipments of monkeys from Cambodia to the U.S. stopped after indictments of Cambodian officials in 2022, but insiders tell PETA they have recently resumed. The monkeys were reportedly imported by Charles River Laboratories.
Higuero inexplicably took the facilities at the center of these schemes at their word during a recent visit to Cambodia. She also asserted that she could not share key information with the Standing Committee, citing “reasons of confidentiality,” and later claimed there was “no evidence of wild-caught animals being laundered as captive-bred”—before advising the Standing Committee to abandon scrutiny of the country’s monkey trade.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
